Dorothea Puente drugged, buried tenants at home in 1980s

With no hesitation, John Cabrera walked briskly back into a home he hadn’t seen in 25 years – one that would give most people the creeps.

Cabrera had been waiting for this day, but wanted to return only under the right circumstances.

"I wanted to come back when the house is redone, when it's happy,” Cabrera said. “I love this house. It's happy.”

The house is the Victorian at 1426 F Street, where serial killer Dorothea Puente drugged and buried her tenants, and collected their Social Security benefits in the 1980s.

Cabrera, a retired Sacramento police sergeant, was the lead detective on the case.

"Happy" might be the last word most people would use to describe the home, except that its current owners, Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams, have remodeled it. The couple has brightened the home, enlarged some spaces and added oddly playful reminders of the crimes, like yellow crime tape across a shower entry and a mannequin holding a shovel in the backyard. It was part of the annual Old City Home Tour on Sunday.

But Cabrera, who gave KCRA 3 a tour of the home, is one of just a few people who can accurately describe the grim circumstances that brought him to the home more than two decades ago.

"And this is what we would call ‘The Death Room,’” Cabrera said, as he stood in a bedroom. “This is where she brought her victims, after she had induced drugs or alcohol. And she would place them here on the floor, and they would lay here for up to days or weeks, we don’t know.”

Pointing to a narrow staircase, Cabrera said, “The stairways, this is how she took her victims out, right here."

But even this solved mystery includes details still unknown by law enforcement officers.

“It's always been our opinion that somebody helped her, but we don't know who helped her,” he said.

In 1988 Cabrera and detectives found seven bodies buried in the backyard of the home. Today there are flower beds, a deck -- and on Sunday, the tour groups. Cabrera was among hundreds who visited the home.

The house would be historic even without its notorious past. It was built in 1895.

“I'm grateful that now the community can come and see it,” Cabrera said. “And this veil of uncertainty, this veil of unhappiness has been lifted from this property."

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